AMD Vice President Leaves After 25-Year Tenure and Joins Samsung

The man will become Samsung VP and chief system architect

As if the departure of AMD China's leader weren't enough, Advanced Micro Devices has lost another staff member, one of the few true veterans that stayed with the company from almost the very beginning.

Michael Goddard was AMD's corporate vice president for product design engineering and chief engineer on client products until earlier this month (December 2012).

He held that position for a number of years, but his full tenure with the Sunnyvale, California-based company was much longer.

In fact, the man joined AMD back when it was only making clones of Intel processors and, thus, was merely a second source of processors for PC makers.

Indeed, Goddard worked for AMD for a full 25 years, enough to make people think he wouldn't choose anything else.

Nevertheless, he is the VP and chief engineer no longer. From now on, he will be Samsung's vice president and chief system architect.

Goddard's new office is located in Samsung’s Austin R&D center, where it is believed that future manufacturers are being developed.

It is interesting to note that this is the second high-profile staff member that leaves AMD in order to join Samsung.

Earlier this year, vice president and general manager of AMD Opteron division Patrick Patla left AMD and became a developer of Samsung server processors.

Add to that the many other executives that left or were let go, only to be hired by Apple, Qualcomm and others, and there isn't much of an argument against seeing everything as an exodus of AMD talent and manpower.

Speaking of manpower, Advanced Micro Devices has also fired a substantial share of its workforce (15% during the latest batch only). The IT player is reorganizing itself according to its new focus (mobile chips, slower desktop CP process advancement), but some people have just left for greener pastures.